The Fifth Child

Maud Lenoir had laid the box flat on the sorting table beneath the fluorescent lights of the temporary storeroom. She was removing the sleeves one by one with the care she reserved for fragile objects and sensitive colleagues. Through the yellowed polyester, slides from the summer of 1996 resembled tiny, badly washed windows: children in windbreakers, a white bus, a pine-paneled dining room, then the lake, pale gray, motionless even in the grass along its edge.

There are four children in the camp photograph. Each of them remembers a fifth.